Chapter One #2
Mrs. Dove-Lyon put her hands on her hips as she usually did when she made a decision that was final. “You’ll keep Rosine safe, won’t you?”
He let the request hang. Lemon and ink sharpened the air; her name felt like a lit taper in a draught, and anger pricked that it needed guarding at all—because of what they were, not what they’d done.
“Routes only through the service corridors,” Mrs. Dove-Lyon said. “You walk them at change of shift, set the door chain, and report names if a gentleman wanders where he shouldn’t. If trouble arises, you signal Titan and close the kitchen first.”
“I understand,” Sander said. “I keep her whole and the House quiet.” Stay alert and don’t run from danger.
He ran once, and his brother and parents couldn’t catch up fast enough.
Sander owed his family his breath and wore survival as the only one of his kin like penance—hidden, watchful, alone—convinced that staying small was the only way to keep anyone safe.
Since he’d come to London, he’d built steadiness from scraps since he’d escaped the Pale of Settlement: a wage, a latch, a post.
Sander didn’t answer right away.
“How do you want me to keep her safe exactly?” Sander asked with as much caution as he could muster, but the assignment was quite frankly absurd.
He’d guard the institution at the Lyon’s Den.
Rosine, however, was a person free to move about, and this assignment could pull him away from the…
well… everything he’d focused on for his entire time working for Mrs. Dove-Lyon.
One wrong whisper and the House would call it negligence, turn him out, and leave her exposed. Lovers might weather gossip; employees did not.
“You think I want you to step into the light,” she said quietly as if teasing his doubt from him.
Since escaping the Pale of Settlement, he had kept only this: a wage he could count, a bed that was his, work he knew how to do.
When the killing had reached his village, he’d been fast enough to run, and his brother had been too slow to be spared.
Sander had been old enough to know his parents were not getting up again; all he carried away was his brother’s chipped chessboard and the memory of his mother’s steady courage.
He crossed half a continent on stubborn instinct and borrowed hope, until London finally took him in—a boy with no name that could shield him and no coin to buy safety.
Mrs. Dove-Lyon had changed his fate with her, the dangerous, dazzling possibility of surviving on his own terms.
She wanted that same surety—she’d told him so, more than once.
But with Mrs. Dove-Lyon’s orders, making her safety his official duty, the math changed—one blunder and the house would call it a mistake—take me off the board and leave her in check.
And then, he would be alone again, and she would be the price of it. I have to stay and protect Rosine.
“Then give me a move I can win,” he said. “I’ll keep her safe—and put the purse from my next exhibition toward her sign.”
He exhaled. “I think you’re setting me up to lose the only thing I’ve managed to keep, which is my job. If I stand beside her, I’ll say my name out loud once. Let the mark fall on both of us, not on her alone.”
“No. The job of all my Jewish staff is at risk and could risk the entire Lyon’s Den.
” She spoke gently, but the words still cut.
“That’s why I’m questioning whether hiding your name is still keeping you safe.
Or if it’s only keeping you small. And if it’s costing more than you realize—not only for you, but for others. ”
“What has Rosine done to Nagy?” he asked—though he knew the answer. Jews didn’t need to do anything to invoke a hunter’s ire. His family hadn’t. And yet some part of him still reached for justice, for fairness, for a reason that would make sense of the cruelty.
“Nagy is chasing Rosine,” Mrs. Dove-Lyon’s tone carried so much regret. “If he focuses on one Jew in this house, he’ll pull the thread until he has a list, and the Lyon’s Den will bleed. I prefer that we choose the ground rather than leave her to carry the target alone.”
Sander bowed and looked at the hearth. At the place where the rug had worn thin, where men had once knelt and lied and bartered for time. I’m going to put myself in front of Rosine to shield her just as she shields the Lyon’s Den. Did Rosine even know of the threat against her?
Just as Sander turned to go, Mrs. Dove-Lyon spoke again: “Men like Nagy don’t fear strength, Sander,” she said behind him, her voice steady as a blade being drawn. “They fear the ones who stop hiding behind the ruts of their jobs.”
He paused, hand already on the doorknob. His fingers curled around the cold brass, worn smooth by years of use. He didn’t turn back, but his voice carried enough.
“I’ll do as you ask.”
Impossible trouble. And yet—her wisdom had carried this place longer than he’d been alive. What did she see coming that he couldn’t?
As he left, the fire’s warmth grazed the back of his neck—and then was gone.
He stepped into the hallway. The air was cooler, but something clung to it now.
Cardamom. Sweet, faint, fresh.
Rosine was baking. It was early in the morning. Rosine made the dough and would let it rise till it was ready to bake in the early afternoon.
A dull ache spread in his chest; change had been a small word on a page once, and then the pieces were swept, his side of the board gone. Change is what cost my family their lives.
Yet Nagy had dragged it in like a draft through an open door, and Mrs. Dove-Lyon had answered by handing him a new assignment.
He couldn’t shake the sense that even though Mrs. Dove-Lyon couldn’t have known what Nagy’s plan would be, it was no accident he had been placed outside her office tonight, guarding her and listening to Nagy’s threats to take the entire Den down if it didn’t sacrifice its Jewish staff.
No accident that it was Rosine she’d bound to his protection in the name of the Lyon’s Den, the one person whose absence every patron would notice—because her sweet buns were a staple.
She made the Den’s own ‘lion-knots,’ braided rosette buns that rose into four small peaks, each brushed with lemon syrup and finished with a cinnamon-cardamom drizzle, served warm at indecent hours when no other bakery fired an oven.
Surely the Black Widow of Whitehall had a plan. She always did. Sander wasn’t sure he had the power—or the will—to refuse it. Not where Rosine was concerned.
No more retreat. The open file was there; in the morning, he’d make the first move—and he wouldn’t make it alone.